Thread by @FixTheCourt

A thread on recusals, which got all of 2 minutes of chatter the last 3 days:

Judge Kavanaugh listed 136 times he recused from a D.C. Circuit case in his @senjudiciary questionnaire (judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…). He couldn't recall the reason for 90 of them. 90 of them! That's nuts.

Let's start by looking at cases where he does recall why he recused. There's CREW v Office of Admin., on the millions of lost WH e-mails, i.e., the parody that writes itself. There's Jud. Cmte. v Miers, on the firing of U.S. attorneys. There's Wilson v Libby on the Plame affair.

And there's Klay v Panetta, on sexual assault in Navy/Marine Corps. He worked on all these cases while in the Bush White House.

While at Kirkland, he worked for Big Tobacco in US v Philip Morris, where court held cigarette companies conspired to deceive ppl about health effects

Given how many ppl are working on this, they couldn't find anyone to go through the missing recusals & figure out reasons?

Since #SCOTUS is already SO GOOD at forgetting to recuse despite statutory conflicts, putting another forgetful recusal-er on bench will have consequences

Ginsburg forgot to recuse in the mid-90s due to her husband's stocks. Kennedy forgot to recuse in the mid-90s related to his going on Westlaw junkets. Oh and Thomas for years forgot to put his wife's salary on his financial disclosure report.

More recently, in OT08, Alito forgot to recuse in FCC v Fox despite his son’s stock in Disney, a party on the Fox side. In OT15 Roberts forgot to recuse in ABB Inc v Arizona Board of Regents, due to his stock in Texas Instruments stock, a party on the ABB side.

Also in OT15 Breyer forgot to recuse in FERC v EPSA due to his stock in Johnson Controls, a party on the EPSA side. In OT16 Roberts forgot to recuse in Life Technologies v Promega due to his ownership of stock in Thermo Fisher Scientific, which owns Life Technologies

In OT16 and OT17 Kagan TWICE forgot to recuse in Jennings v Rodriguez due to her previous work on the case. And in OT17 Kennedy forgot to recuse in Washington v US despite his previous work on the case (that's forgivable since his "previous work" was from 1985)

From watching the hearings, reading thousands of docs (& trying to obtain more), you just know that history is going to repeat itself & a Justice Kavanaugh will sit on, say, an affirmative action case from Michigan but then - oops - he'll remember he worked on the Grutter brief

Or there'll be a Carpenter II next term, & SG Francisco will use a theory he & Kavanaugh developed when working together on warrantless wiretapping during the Bush admin - which we'll only learn about when all of the Kavanaugh papers come out in 2021

Or there'll be another mil. commissions case & we'll learn too late there's overlap b/w class at #SCOTUS & earlier class in CADC.

The possibilities are endless, but there are real-world consequences to recusal forgetfulness & it's a shame no @senjudiciary member asked about it